English writer known for disillusioned, suspenseful spy novels based
on a wide knowledge of international espionage. Le Carré's famous hero
is George Smiley, a Chekhovian character and shadowlike member of the
British Foreign Service. In his work the author has explored the moral
problems of patriotism, espionage, and ends versus means. Le Carré's
style is precise and elegant, and his novels are noted for skillful
plotting and witty dialogue. Familiarity with intelligence agents
connects le Carré to the long tradition of spy/writers from Christopher
Marlowe, Ben Johnson and Daniel Defoe to the modern day writers, such
as Graham Greene, John Dickson Carr, Somerset Maugham, Alec Waugh, and Ted Allbeury.

"Beyond the trees, Smiley thought, cars
are passing. Beyond the trees lies a whole world, but Lacon has this
red castle and a sense of Christian ethic that promises him no reward
except a knighthood, the respect of his peers, a fat pension, and a
couple of charitable directorships in the City." (Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, 1974)

John Le Carré is the pen name of David Cornwell. He was born in
Poole, Dorset, the son of Ronnie Cornwell, who engaged in
swindles and was imprisoned for fraud. Though Ronnie Cornwell was
bankrupt, he managed to keep his office going in Jermyn Street, he had
credit and he also participated in politics. According to the author,
this has been one of the reasons that themes of secrets and
deceit recur in his work. His father's chameleonic character inspired
the novel A Perfect Spy (1986). Le Carré's mother, Olive
(Glassy) Cornwell, left the family when he was five. "I have no
memory of mourning my mother at all," le Carré has confessed, but her
absence was another secret, which shaped his early years. Le Carré did
not meet his mother until he was 21.

Dissatisfied with Sherborne School, le Carré persuaded his father to send him to school in
Switzerland. At Sherbone his relationship with the rigid housemaster was not good and le Carré
started to view institutions with growing suspicion. He studied at Berne University (1948-49), and
after military service, which he did in Austria, le Carré returned to England. In Switzerland
le Carré met an English diplomat, who possibly was attached to intelligence work, and he
become fascinated by espionage – it was the call for le Carré. He studied modern languages
at Lincoln College, Oxford, graduating in 1956. At Oxford he kept a very low profile. Later it
has been claimed, that le Carré was already a spy. He was two years as a tutor at Eton,
teaching French and German, and then joined the Foreign Service.

In 1959 le Carré became a member of the British Foreign Service in
West Germany, where he made friends of German politicians. Later he was
consul in Hamburg. The most famous double agent of the Cold War, "Kim"
Philby (1912-1988), betrayed le Carré, and gave his name among others
to the Russians. Philby died in Moscow, where he read every le Carré
book.

During his years at the operational section of MI5 le Carré met
John Bingham, who encouraged him to write and read the manuscript of
his first novel. Bingham, the pen-name and family name of Lord
Clanmorris, was one of the two men who inspired le Carré's famous
character, George Smiley: "Short, fat and of a quiet disposition, he
appeared to spend a lot of money on really bad clothes..." Bingham, who
had published crime novels, never accepted the picture of the
Intelligence Services that le Carré gave in his books. "As far as John
was concerned – and many others too – claims of good intent were
guff. I was a shit, consigned to the ranks of other shits like Compton
McKenzie, Malcolm Muggeridge and J.C. Masterman, all of whom had
betrayed the Service by writing about it." (Le Carré in his introduction
to Bingham's Five Roundabouts to Heaven,
Pan Classic Crime, 2001)

His first three books le Carré wrote while he was a spy but for
decades he denied that his work in Germany had any element of
espionage. His employing service had approved his two earlier novels before publication. This was the case also with The Spy Who Came in from the Cold
(1963), which he wrote under personal stress and in extreme privacy in
the British Embassy in Bonn. The story was regarded as fiction and did
not constitute a breach of security. But le Carré's life was never the
same: he was billed as a spy-turned-writer. Gradually he broke
his silence and has talked about
this and other sides of his life in the BBC documentary The Secret Service (prod. 2000).
Le Carré has insisted that he was never James Bond or anything like
that: "I sat behind a desk". However, he was taught how to kill
silently, and he recruited and ran low-level agents.

At Lincoln College he apparently kept his eyes open for possible agents
recruited by the Soviet Union. Later le Carré moved from MI5 to MI6, and
he was in Berlin when the wall was erected – "the fun had started".
His own experiences inspired him to compose a novel which became Call for the Dead (1961),
le Carré's first spy thriller, which introduced George Smiley.
Later the author himself considered it only a so-so book.
It was followed by a completely different kind of
work, A Murder of Quality (1962), a detective novel set in a boys' school.

After the success of his third novel, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold,
le Carré began to devote himself full-time to writing. His aim was to portray
the intelligence world from a new standpoint – "When I first began writing, Ian
Fleming was riding high and the picture of the spy was that of a character who could
have affairs with women, drive a fast car, who used gadgetry and gimmickry
to escape." With his breakthrough novel le Carré established an alternative
form to the James Bond cult and a new type of hero. Graham Greene considered it the best
spy story he had ever read and J.B. Priestley wrote that the book was "superbly
constructed with an atmosphere of chilly hell." The novel won le Carré the
Somerset Maugham Award.

The Spy Who Came in from the Cold is the story of a
frustrated British agent, Alec Leamas, whose life is far from the
glamour of James Bond's world: he has a love affair with a lonely,
unpaid librarian, not with a fashion model. After his sub-agents in
East Germany have been killed, Leamas travels behind the Iron Curtain
to destroy the head of the East German Intelligence, who has directed
the killings. Soon he finds out that his own people had framed him in
order to frame Fiedler, an East German. In the world of
double-crossing, Leamas has no way out – he is used and destroyed
by his superiors. George Smiley is the shadowy mastermind of the
operation. "We have to live without sympathy, don't we? That's
impossible of course. We act it to one another, all this hardness; but
we aren't like that really, I mean... one can't be out in the cold all
the time; one has to come in from the cold... d'you see what I mean?"
(from The Spy Who Came in from the Cold)
The novel was filmed in 1966. The harshly photographed black and white
film was directed by Martin Ritt, starring Richard Burton, Claire
Bloom, and Oskar Werner.

Looking Glass War (1965) continued the exploration of
the intrigues of the Intelligence Service. It began with the death of a
courier, who had been sent to Finland, one of the spy centers of
Europe, to collect films taken by a commercial pilot, who had flown off
course while over East Germany. Orders are given for the planting of an
agent in this territory where, it is suspected, a new type of rocket
site is being set up.

A Small Town in Germany (1968) was set in the same town, Bonn, where le
Carré had worked. In this novel Second Secretary in Chancery, Leo
Harting, has disappeared. The story deals with topical issues, student
riots and rising neo-Fascism, with an ambiguous message about what might
happen in the near future in Federal Germany. In Tinker, Tailor,
Soldier, Spy (1974) le Carré re-introduced George Smiley. His
character was based more or less on two true life persons:
Lord Clanmorris, who wrote novels under the name John Bingham and
who worked for MI5, and Vivian Green, who was Le Carre's teacher at
Oxford. In this story a Soviet double agent has
revealed some of the best agents in the English spy network. The mole
is one of them – but which one? It was followed by The Honourable
Schoolboy and Smiley's People (1979), sometimes known as the
'Search for Karla trilogy', because the central theme is the struggle
between Smiley and the Soviet spymaster Karla. The first two were made
into hugely successful television dramatizations.

The Little Drummer Girl (1983) was narrated in the
second person, and was about the cause of Palestinian liberation. The
central character is an actress, who is persuaded by an Israeli agent
to lose her Arab sympathies and spy for them. The book was made into a
film in 1984, losing in the process le Carré's intricate plotting.
"Nothing went right", said the author later. One of the actors, Juliano
Mer-Khamis, was killed in April 2011 in Jenin's
refugee camp, where he ran a theater.

Before the last or latest Smiley novel, The Secret Pilgrim
(1991), le Carré published A Perceft Spy (1986),
drawing on his own relations with his domineering father, and The Russian House
(1989), a response to the end of the Cold War, where a
British publisher becomes involved in espionage by a Soviet woman, who
acts as emissary for a volatile friend. The novel was adapted for
screen, starring Sean Connery and Michelle Pfeiffer.

In 1954 le Carré married Ann Martin, the daughter of a Royal Air
Force officer. He lived in the 1960s on various Greek islands, but then
returned to England. After divorce in 1971 he married in 1972 Valérie
Jane Eustace, a book editor. They met when she was working for his
British publisher, Hodder & Stoughton. Le Carré has four
children, three from his first marriage. Because le Carré writes with
pen and ink, she has typed his manuscripts up for him.

The fall of the Soviet Union and reunification of Germany left
spy fiction adrift and le Carre turned his attention to the new roles of
cloak and dagger people. The Night Manager (1993) was about drug smuggling
and in Our Game (1995) two former spies and a woman find the end of their
road in the mountains of the Caucasus, reflecting the new situation and
the end of the Cold War. The Tailor of Panama (1996) has as its background
the future of the Panama Canal. Single&Single (1999) was a
father-and-son story which also dealt with a Russian mafia family.

The Constant Gardener (2000), le Carré's 18th novel, was set in
Africa. Justin Quayle, the middle-aged gardener of the title, is married
to a much younger wife, Tessa, a lawyer and activist. "She was
doing a bloody good job out there in the slums, whatever anybody said
about her up at the Muthaiga Club. She may have got up the noses of Moi's
Boys but Africans who mattered loved her to a man," one of the
characters concludes after she is found brutally killed. Justin is a
disillusioned humanist, who doesn't know much of Tessa's attempts to
reveal an international pharmaceutical intrigue. Justin's passivity
ends after her death but he eventually shares Tessa's fate. Absolute Friends
(2004), accused of anti-American bias, follows the lives of two
man, friends from the radical 1960s, who still try to keep their
anti-establishment idealism in the new millennium. Eventually they are
crushed by international political intrigues. The Mission Song (2006)
takes the reader into the complex relationships between business and
politics in Congo. A Delicate Truth (2013)
warns about the risks of the privatization of intelligence. The story
portrays a hero of the Internet age, who instead of shuttering state
secrets from the public, he leaks at the end information about corrupt
government practices.

In January 2003 le Carré published in The Times an essay
entitled 'The United States has gone mad,' joining a number of
European and American writers protesting about war on
Iraq. "How Bush and his junta succeeded in deflecting America's
anger from bin Laden to Saddam Hussein is one of the great public
relations conjuring tricks of history," argued le Carré.
Richard Cohen answered in the Washington Post, saying that
the essay was "the intellectual collapse of what is called
the anti-war movement." More radical than Mick Jagger,
le Carré has declined all honors offered to him, stating
that he will never be Sir David. In 2005 Britain's crime writers' club
awarded him its Dagger of Daggers for The Spy Who Came in from the
Cold and in 2011 he received the Goethe Medal in honour of his life's work.

Call for the Dead, 1961 - Puhelu vainajalle (suom. Antti Salomaa, 1964) - Film
adaptation: The Deadly Affair, 1967, dir. Sidney Lumet,
screenplay Paul Dehn, starring James Mason, Simone Signoret, Maximilian
Schell, Harriet Anderson. "The two worlds portrayed in the movie,
the world of espionage and the almost masochist love this man feels for
his wife, formed the basic concept for the score. But this time,
instead of two themes, Quincy [Jones] created only one: a painfully
beautiful love song, sung by Astrud Gilberto. However, as the picture
progressed, it slowly turned into one of the most exciting melodramatic
scores I'd ever heard. It proved the power and importance of musical
arrangements." (in Making Movies by Sidney Lumet, 1995)